


From the Diary of Daniel Jackson - Children of the Gods

by Waldo



Series: Stargate SG-1: Diaries and Reports Series [1]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Diary or Journal, Episode Related, Episode: s01e02 Children of the Gods, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-08-11
Updated: 2002-08-11
Packaged: 2017-10-07 09:56:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waldo/pseuds/Waldo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the first time since the original Abydos mission, Daniel can start keeping a Journal again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From the Diary of Daniel Jackson - Children of the Gods

From the Diary of Daniel Jackson...

Entry #1

Paper and a pen.  I had pretty much written off ever seeing either one of these again in my life time.  Of course, I had also written off seeing Earth again.  
      
I'm staying with Jack for the time being.  Colonel O'Neill.  I never quite figured out how to address him.  Everyone else calls him 'Colonel', but I'm not military, so I guess that leaves me with 'Jack'.  He hasn't objected yet, so I guess it's okay.  
     
 Anyway, I seem to be staying with him until I actually get a paycheck - apparently the military can hire civilians long-term without enlisting them - and for that I am eternally grateful, I can't see me as Private Daniel Jackson. Is it Private in the Air Force?  Wow do I have a lot of catching up to do on all this military stuff.  Anyway, they're apparently hiring me on as... well... I'd say Jack of all trades, but we all ready have a Jack, and my name isn't so bad as names go.    
      
I think I'm over-tired.  
      
But about my name...  It is a little odd to hear it pronounced with the 'l' on the end instead of 'Danyer' like the Abydonian accent made it.  Sometimes I don't even turn around until I've been called several times or someone taps me on the shoulder.  Nevermind the military penchant for calling people by their last name only.  I hadn't *heard* my last name spoken aloud in a year.  I had to condition myself to respond to it.  And then I found myself turning around when someone was talking to Jack, because I assumed they were calling me "Jackson" despite the fact that I really don't like it.  
      
Another place, another identity, another me.  
      
I've lost a year in a dream.  I fell back into step with living on Earth - with microwaves and VCRs and McDonald's - which my stomach didn't handle real well last night, I guess it's all the fat - and cars and flour that comes in a bag  - so fast that it seems that I dreamed Abydos.  And Sha're.    
     
 I'm not sure Jack quite gets what happened with that.  With me and Sha're, I mean.  Abydonian law is similar to most ancient Earth cultures wherein a wife belongs first to her father and then to her husband.  Sha're was given to me and it would have been one *hell* of an insult for me to refuse.  I wanted to.  I never saw myself as the marrying kind.  Jack thinks I'm a geek.  And he's right.  I have, like, no social skills to speak of.  I'm an outcast in my own academic community, nevermind what I'll manage to screw up in a military complex.  
      
He replaced the screw in my glasses.  Somewhere along the line on Abydos, I lost the screw that held the temple to the frame.   I held it on with some cloth soaked in some sort of sap that made it sticky.  It kept getting in my hair - which Jack says I need to cut.  Anyway, while the doctors at the SCG were poking at me and virtually draining me of blood, Jack replaced the screw.  I wonder what possessed him to do that?  
      
Um.... I was talking about Sha're.  I even avoid the difficult stuff in my own journal, how sad is that?  Anyway, she was given to me.  I really didn't have a whole lot of choices but to accept if I wanted to make any inroads with those people.  And god knows we needed their support when it all came tumbling down.  
      
But I didn't want her.  God help me, but I didn't.  
      
I did grow to love her.  I guess in that way we were lucky.  I've seen plenty of arranged marriages in many parts of the world that didn't work out nearly as well.  Hell, when I was fifteen one of my best friends from school was shipped back to India from New York to marry someone she'd never met.  I remember her sending me a letter telling me she'd run away to get back to the States and she'd contact me when she could.  She never did.  I still don't know what happened to her.  
      
Anyway, Sha're and I... got along.  She actually became the best friend I had there.  I was her husband, I was responsible for her in all ways and we got along.  Actually that makes it look more morbid than it was.  I told Jack about how she used to laugh at me when I tried to do things.  It was great.  She was the first person I can actually say laughed with me, instead of at me.  I've been laughed *at* a lot in my life.  And I think I've gotten pretty good at pretending it didn't hurt.    
     
 With Sha're... it wasn't personal.  I looked kind of stupid sometimes.  I can admit that.  I think the difference was that she didn't just stand there and laugh.  She laughed *while* she helped me.  It wasn't that I was an idiot - I was ignorant in the true sense of the word - and... I just looked silly.  That doesn't bother me much.  There is a world of difference between looking silly and feeling stupid.  Sha're could keep me on the better side of the line.  And she got nasty with anyone who tried to push me over the other way.  
      
Speaking of looking silly...  Jack gave me this hat...  When the doctors were having at me, he went to the quartermaster and got me some clothes that made me fit in a little better than the robes I wore on Abydos.  So here I was with this stack of regulation green military clothes - down to the regulation green boxers - and this hat.  
     
I didn't know the military made fishing hats.  
      
I think Jack thought I'd laugh and 'lose' it.  But I'll show him.  I'm going to wear it.  
      
I think Jack wanted to knock my head off - hat and all - himself when I asked to be taken as one of those Jaffa things.  I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking of when I volunteered for that ... ceremony thing.  
      
I need to get her back.  It's my responsibility.  *She's* my responsibility.  And hell, if I don't exactly love her like I'm supposed to - I like her.  
      
Speaking of interesting women... I like Dr. Captain Samantha Carter.  Talk about not knowing what to call someone.  She's military through and through and I can guess that we'll have our fall-outs over it, but.... she's interesting.  She's a scientist and she seems willing to cut me a lot of slack because at least we have those three magic initials in common... Ph.D.  
     
 Of course she's an astrophysicist and I do well to remember that gravity means I'm going to fall down if I don't watch where I'm walking.  We don't have overmuch in common that way, but I like her.  Maybe just because she draws some of Jack's anti-scientist heat.  And maybe if I watch her, I'll learn how to keep it from stinging so much when it's aimed at me.  
     
I need to be on the team to rescue Sha're.  But I have to question if, in the grand scheme of things, I'll help or hinder more.  
      
Jack is making me learn to shoot a gun.  
      
And if someone had asked me if I'd ever hold a weapon against another human being, a year and month ago I would have said no.  
      
But a year ago, I did.  I got tossed one of those staff weapons, and I shot one of those Jaffa things.  I killed it.  I had nightmares about it for months on Abydos.  I don't kill bugs if I can possibly avoid it, but I had killed that man.  
      
I made the mistake of explaining this - *trying* to explain this to Jack when he told me I had to report to the firing range.  I knew, as soon as the words left my mouth, which formulated, pat, military answer he'd give me.  He told me that a person trained to use weapon was much more likely to hit only the target they aimed for,  was more likely to be able to wound instead of kill if the situation would allow for it.  I knew that would be his answer.  His 'how to appease the civilian' response.  
      
Maybe I wouldn't hate the idea so much if he'd be willing to teach me himself.  Or if Sam had volunteered.  She was standing there when Jack gave me the order.  I'm not blind.  I see the looks people give me in the halls of the SGC.  I know enough about closed societies to know that I've pissed off more than a few people by insisting I get myself assigned to SG-1.  Not just the SGC, I had to be with the first team.  There are more than a few jar heads (or are those Marines?) who think I have "their" place on a military team.  And my guess is that when I go see this Staff Sergeant Marlin tomorrow, I'm going to start seeing how far some of this resentment can go.  I don't think anyone will be stupid enough to actually try and hurt me, but I'm fairly sure there are a few guys there who wouldn't mind humiliating the base's resident civillian-geek-pet-anthropologist-archeologist-linguist.  All said, I'd really rather stick with people I know for a while, but orders are orders, or so Dr. Captain Carter told me when I met her for lunch and complained.  
      
I thought about telling Jack where to shove his orders since I'm a civilian, but I need to be on this team too much to piss him off.  Besides, I'm living in his house, and when I'm not in those annoying green Army clothes, I'm wearing his.  I have nothing of my own.  
      
I went to Abydos with two suitcases, mostly of books and pictures, a few extra changes of shorts and socks.  I didn't even have that much when I came back.    
      
Every single thing I 'have' actually belongs to Jack or the military.  I have no idea what the Air Force will be paying me - or when for that matter - but I'm guessing it won't be a lot.  And since I need to get an apartment (and with my credit, that'll be interesting), a car, clothes... I need to replace all my books...  God, where do I start?  
      
I don't know that Jack's gonna suffer me taking up his guest bedroom for much longer.  I stay at the SGC as long as I can.  I have a hard time accepting the idea that he could possibly want me around, especially since they gave me a room on the base.  I could stay there.  I probably *should* stay there.  
      
But Jack still comes by the room they said I could use for an office every afternoon and tells me its 'time to go home'.  
      
I wonder if he realizes that I can translate that one word - home - into something like thirty languages, but if someone asked me to define it, I'd be hard pressed.  
      
We both lost something we weren't really looking for on Chulak.  Jack didn't mean for ~~Scara~~ ~~Skara~~ ~~Skah'ra~~ Skaara (god, what is the best way to write that in English?) to replace his son.  But he was doing it anyway.  I wasn't looking for a wife...  
      
This probably isn't the greatest foundation for a friendship - mutual loss.  When we find them, what's left for us?  Hell when we find them, I'll be probably be dropped from SG-1 and stuck in a room full of artifacts and pictures, so I guess it doesn't really matter.  
      
Why do I care so much?  
      
Maybe because the SGC is my last hope for any kind of usefulness and he's the only one there who doesn't think I'm completely hopeless.  I got him home from Abydos that first time, so maybe he thinks he owes me for a while or something.  
      
He's across the room watching a hockey game he video-taped.  It makes me wonder about what he's done in the past year.  He told me he retired again, but he's... so different.  
      
A man going on a suicide mission doesn't set the VCR.  
      
I don't get sports.  Never will, don't really want to.  Jack spent the first fifteen minutes or so trying to explain it to me, and I tried to follow, but I'm just having a hard time paying attention to things I just don't give a damn about right now.  
      
So I told him I had to get some work done.  Captain Dr. Carter video-taped the cartouche on Abydos and I'm working on the written translation of the walls around it.  It was nice of the military to at least spring for a laptop, so I can take this stuff with me.  I don't have anything else I can be doing.  I don't own anything else to do.  I have a government issue bag with a government issue computer and a few government issue notebooks and government issue pens.  And I'm wearing Jack's socks.  This is so incredibly frustrating.  I'm used to living with very few things, but I generally can come up with cab fare or the damn twenty-nine cents for a spiral notebook to use as a journal and the ten cents for a cheap pen.  I wanted to crawl under a rock last night when Jack suggesting going for fast food on the way out of the mountain and I knew I couldn't even pay for a hamburger.    
      
He seemed to get it when I mumbled something about just grabbing whatever was in the commissary.  So he paid for dinner and I looked for a bigger rock.  He told me not to worry about it, that it would take time for me to get back on my feet, but ... well, I guess he doesn't understand how important independence is to me.  I'm all I've ever had.  
     
Jack doesn't talk much.  I think that might surprise a few people at the SGC.  Jack's a wiseass.  Everyone knows that.  But I see a different man here at night. He's pretty quiet, kind of contemplative.  Which can make me a little buggy.  I like to talk.  A lot.  I know I couldn't get to the point of a dart with any kind of speed.  It was great on Abydos.  All these people who had never heard the stories of Greek or Roman mythology or Norse, or Celtic or even fairy tales.  I told the Brothers Grimm versions to the adults and the Disney version to the kids.  And they were fascinated.  Once they got over the whole gods-Chappa-ai thing and realized I was just a man, they sort of made me the town bard.  It was great.  It was something I could do without someone showing me how - even if I stumbled over a word now and then.  
      
I've tried telling Jack some of the stories about Abydos, but I always got the impression he wasn't really listening.    
      
And I learned that old habits die hard.  When I got shut out, I grabbed a book or something I'd brought home from work and hid.  I tried to tell myself that I was giving him the peace and quiet of his home that my arrival had so rudely interrupted, but I know myself better than that.  I think.  
      
He thinks I'm working on the translation now.  He's yelling at someone who's name must be 'Number 34' the way he's saying it like some sort of Chinese curse.  I don't think he even remembers I'm here.    
      
Anyway, I can't seem to focus on the hieroglyphics right now.  I did take the pictures out, but the extra notebook I snuck out of supply seemed to be calling me.  I haven't been able to keep a journal since I left.  I should probably start writing down everything I remember before it all fades.  I'm almost eidetic.  Not quite, I have trouble with long strings of numbers for some reason, but even when you have a damn near photographic memory, the pictures dull and fade over time.  
      
My head is going in too many circles.  I've been back on this planet for three days.  To everyone else it was like I was on some sort of extended vacation, but it doesn't just work like that.  I had accepted my new life.  I had a few regrets - just a few - about leaving my life on Earth, but all said, my life on Abydos was better.  
      
Everyone thinks I should be happy to be back.  
      
Well, it doesn't work like that.  
      
I must be writing too loud our something because Jack is looking at me now.  
      
Why in the world would we go sit on the roof in the middle of the night, Jack?  
      
This probably wouldn't be a good time to explain to him that I'm none too keen on heights, would it?  
      
Oh, well, can't be rude to the host now, can we?


End file.
